First, thanks for taking the time to read this. Thanks even more if you can help!

A few background points:

I have two Lightroom catalogs I want to move from my PC to my new, shiny iMac.

Both were kept (and will be kept) on the computer's internal hard drive.

I have successfully installed Lightroom on the iMac.

I have successfully moved all the files of the actual photos, the LR catalog, and the preview files to the iMac

I attempted to open one of the catalogs by just double-clicking on the file itself. That worked, sort of. I then right-clicked on the folder and used the "synchronize folder" command. That got me my photos, but the program started re-creating all the previews AND, more importantly, none of the develop history, the ratings, the color codes, etc., were imported.

So, obviously I did this wrong. I would really appreciate a step by step description of how to do it correctly.

I've done this twice, completely deleting and re-tranferring all LR related files, and still cannot get my color labels to move to the iMac. Looking around on the internet I see that this is somewhat of a recurring issue. Could the fact that I have a custom set of label names be part of the problem. We're talking nearly 10,000 photos, so I can't very well go in and relabel each one.

Thanks, Victoria, but I'm afraid that I may have mischaracterized the problem. It's not that the text associated with the label has failed to come over (although that is true, and would be corrected as you describe), it's the color designation (or label, if you prefer) that is missing. Instead of showing green, blue, etc., they are all white (indicating a "custom" label?). On my PC, in grid view, each photo has a green, blue or purple designation (I don't use yellow or red). On the iMac, in the same view, all photographs are designated white.